alright, I voted "yes" because it can't hurt (to have VAC, not to vote "yes"), but even if it happens, don't expect VAC to be some sort of mix of robocop and charles bronson...

it's far from being perfect. just yesterday, a buddy of mine encountered two obvious cheaters in cs:go, the guys weren't even hiding it, saying it in the chat, telling the world how they have multiple accounts anyway. clearly not the brightest of the bunch, so they probably were using free cheats and weren't banned at once.

valve have always said the way it works is you get banned a couple of months after so you can't know what triggered it (that would be the cheats, duh ?) and so the legend says every two or three months, a lot of accounts get banned and the evil cheaters cry in a dark corner because they have to throw 14€ valve's way to get back in without anybody knowing.

that's all fine and dandy, but how could that work with ql ? usually the nihilists like daddy don't care about making new accounts every other day, every other months would be a massive break for them. registering on steam isn't THAT much of a hindrance either. so id still would have to chase the bad guys around and with some luck, a few sneaky togglers MIGHT get caught IF they're using retarded free cheats. granted, those are the hardest to catch and it would alleviate some doubts in leagues (or the more serious public CA) but there are no certainties here

there's no magic formula, there'll always be cheaters, you can only reduce their number and make it difficult for them. that would still require a dedicated member in the staff updating his system when a new cheat is out (meaning money and an anti-cheat being somewhat a priority), for now we're stuck with the amateurish cg_wh 1 and I don't see VAC being much of a messiah

They could forced-allow only those who own games that they were BUYING on their Steam account to play quakelive, so when they are caught cheating the removing of their Steam account would permanently make them lose games they paid for.

Quake Live should have a system where well-known quake players can see demoes of reported players. Basically like the "Overwatch" system in CSGO. It'd be a great way to get the persons opinion on the demo and would give the QL staff a better idea of who to ban. Overwatch bans turn into VAC bans after a little while but, VAC bans aren't straight away and the VAC anticheat itself isn't very good but would do more than what QL's "anticheat" does.

The system is completely anonymous, you can't collude with other Overwatchers and you can't ascertain the identity of the people in the game. At the end of the demo you are given two options: either there is insufficient evidence or the player is evidently cheating beyond reasonable doubt.

If you give an incorrect verdict then your Overwatch score (not visible) is reduced making your verdicts carry less weight in the future. Therefore for your judgement to be relevant you have the incentive making correct verdict. The system even throws in test cases occasionally (eg, from pro games or where a player was previously cleared) to curb any abuses.

It honestly wouldn't be that hard, if you took advantage of a "Report Cheater" button and make an SQL Row be recorded saying that this person reported this player for cheating with this demo supplied.... Then make it display for anyone under the "trusted user" list.

Not that much. You would have to make the reviews public so that a player's "reputation" is at stake if he attempts to be biased. Granted, there are people who are more trigger happy with their convictions but on the other hand the more reticent ones would balance it out.

If you additionally introduced some incentive to do a good job (I dont know, a Quarterly Best Cheater-Reviewer rewarded out of donations or given a 3-month PRO account by id or a Ninox mousepad) it could work even better. There'd have to be a qualitative approach to selecting such a person though, so that people don't go for low-hanging fruit just to boost their numbers.

Of course things like that would only be required and desired for borderline cases. Even I can see an aimbotter in that CS video posted above.

Ok so 90 voters so far who are brave enough to vote. So out of an average of say 3,600 Quakelive players. So that's a 40th of the stats. Give a margin of error in this of course, but if we take it as it stands, as it could be confusing / misleading, to add in other margins, but I am sure that this ESR community has 1000+ users on most of the time. (not sure how many all play Q?)

So there is a fair amount of estimation on this, at this vote count. Taking into account the quality (not supposed to be a joke :P) of the people on ESR board, then this poll could swing either way.

That is, if the non-voters, saw it going in the wrong direction, or didn't see it at all!. Hence don't need to vote (or miss the vote -promote the vote! ;) ) unless it becomes the wrong balance for them.

Anyway, to the point and current poll figures, retention and game playtime:

86% currently yes, 14% drop off is not bad. Probably some of those will play. So let's say 7% go.

That's 93% potential vote from this small statistical cross-section.

Must consider the number of drop off's, from the new players thinking Cheat or not Cheat all the time. Anticheat +some +addressing of it publically, they might find more supportive views that they fear negative. ftw

If they voted no, people would say they really REALLY don't care about stopping cheaters. And if they voted yes, people would say they're just too lazy to create an effective anti-cheat themselves. Or some other nasty things would be said about them no matter what because so many in this community are ungrateful pricks.

Now, it probably would have been best for them to not vote at all, but I think it's fine for them to not care if a third party does or does not apply their third party anti-cheat to QL.

I found RTCW had a pretty good anti-cheat system, most admins let the players see the punkbuster screenshots they randomly took on servers. It probably made your pc glitch for a second during an hour of play but who cares?

If players can browse or have certain admins check screenshots on the serve, I think that would make cheating a bit harder. Despite the hate for punkbuster I thought it was quite good :P

A lot of hacks were made to be "PBSS proof", toggling off when detecting a screenshot and then toggling back on. Hell these days there are even cheats that can overlay a wallhack over the game in such a way that you can stream on twitch without it being visible.

PB did a pretty good job of keeping public cheats out of games but later updates brought terrible optimization/lag/issues which led to it being abandoned by the competitive scene.

I'm not sure I can explain it fully, but I feel that moving quake inside steam somehow diminishes it...it says that quake can't stand on its own as a game and needs the backing of valve. It's not Quake, it's Quake via steam. Maybe you think that sounds mad :p

You're right of course. I'm just reluctant to ever use steam. But discussing this topic is futile anyway, because the decision is not in our hands, as always...